Hi John,

This is Darius whom you've met at SqueakFest. I've been in contact with 
Angelique, Program Coordinator for a Los Angeles - Intel Computer Clubhouse. 
They've been a bit slow responding to my offer to volunteer as a mentor.

They are now interested in starting a First Lego League team. http://www.
firstlegoleague.org/default.aspx?pid=20 by the way.

Talking with the club has made me wonder how Scratch is developing and wonder if 
Squeak has gained any traction at the MIT Media Lab since your June update.

Cheers,
Darius







-----Original Message-----
From: John Maloney [mailto:JohnMaloney at earthlink.net] 
Sent: Monday, June 09, 2003 10:42 AM
To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
Subject: Re: Scratch


Scratch is coming along slowly but steadily. Scratch is an EToy-like
tile-based programming system for non-experts. Its target audience is
somewhat older than that of EToys: kids aged 10-18 who visit after-school
Computer Clubhouses. There is a network of some 70 or so of these
Computer Clubhouses, ~50 in the US and ~20 or so in other countries.
The Computer Clubhouse network started about 10 years ago as
a join project between the MIT Media Lab and the Boston Computer
Museum (now part of the Boston Museum of Science) and then grew
quickly when Intel started funding it.

Aspects of Scratch that are working include the beginnings of a new
tile programming system and the ability to control things using external
sensors (such as light sensors, resistance sensors, etc.), which is great fun.

It will be several years before you hear or see much about Scratch;
we're going to do a lot of testing with kids at local Computer Clubhouses
before releasing it to a wider audience.

A nice side-effect of the Scratch project is that there is a small but
growing community of Squeakers at the MIT Media Lab. I just taught
a four-day "intensive Squeak" class to roughly nine folks, several of
whom are not working on the Scratch project. It is my hope that
Squeak will catch on here and that many interesting things will be
done with it--but only time will tell. There needs to be a critical
mass of people using Squeak at a place like the Media Lab or
it could just die out. But, to balance Squeak's rather imposing
learning curve, Seymour Papert is a strong Squeak supporter
here, and his opinions carry weight.

Scratch is currently based on normal Squeak, not Tweak, but that
could change as Tweak matures.

	-- John



At 10:26 AM -0400 6/9/03, Karl Ramberg wrote:
>John,
>I'll take the oporunity to ask about the progress of Scratch,
>http://llk.media.mit.edu/projects/summaries/scratch.shtml
>
>Karl